Chapter 1. The Planning Process

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Chapter 1. The Planning Process

Welcome to VoltDB, a best-in-class database designed specifically for high volume transactional applications. Since you are reading this book, we assume you are considering the use of VoltDB for an existing or planned database application. The goal of this book is to help you understand the impact of such a decision on your computing environment, with a particular focus on hardware requirements.

Technology evaluation normally involves several related but separate activities:

  • Feature Evaluation

    The goal of the feature evaluation is to determine how well a product's features match up to the needs of your application. For VoltDB, we strongly encourage you to visit our website and review the available product overviews and technical whitepapers to see if VoltDB is right for you. If you need additional information, please feel free to contact us directly.

  • Proof of Concept

    The proof of concept, or POC, is usually a small application that emulates the key business requirements using the proposed technology. The goal of the POC is to verify, on a small scale, that the technology performs as expected for the target usage.

  • Hardware Planning

    Once you determine that VoltDB is a viable candidate for your application, the next step is to determine what hardware environment is needed to run it. Hardware sizing requires an understanding of the requirements of the business application (volume, throughput, and availability needs) as well as the technology. The primary goal of this book is to provide the necessary information about VoltDB to help you perform this sizing exercise against the needs of your specific application.

  • Benchmarking

    Having determined the feasibility of the technology, the final activity is to perform benchmarking to evaluate its performance against the expected workload. Benchmarking is often performed against the proof of concept or a similar prototype application. Benchmarking can help validate and refine the hardware sizing calculations.

Let's assume you have already performed a feature evaluation, which is why you are reading this book. You are now ready to take the next step. The following chapters provide practical advice when building a proof of concept, sizing hardware, and benchmarking a solution with VoltDB.

Note that this book does not help with the detailed application design itself. For recommendations on application design we recommend the other books about VoltDB. In particular, Using VoltDB.